I thought, since Mr Miyagi shared his New Paper interview answers, I would post mine too. In response to the New Paper piece, Chandler, Sheylara and Threez wrote some thoughts on the extensive Sunday New Paper blog coverage. (Scan of TNP taken from Chandler's blog)
Ivan Fernandez of the New Paper also wrote in this blog issue of bloggers:
"They are faceless. And largely out of focus... They hide behind cyber masks, but bare their hearts of darkness."
Quick, grab your torch and pitchforks, the Faceless Zombie Bloggers of Darkness are coming!
My answers to TNP's questions:
1. I am 36 and an Internet Consultant.
2. I have been writing online since 1997. Somewhere along the way, someone pointed out to me that what I was doing on my site was blogging, so ok lor, blogging it shall be.
I think blogging here has evolved in many ways, and now you have blogs by people of all ages, and covering all sorts of topics and interests. It MAY have started out as a young person's diary thing, but the local blogosphere has pretty much followed the global trend of evolving into many forms.
3. Ah that. I felt it was amusing and reacted in an infantile way lor, I invited my readers to help the accuser find some non-infantile blogs for him to read. I thought it was an interesting exercise because many bloggers wrote insightful and soul-searching posts on this issue (ok, some went to the accuser's blog and left angry and silly infantile comments, but you can't avoid that). All in all, I thought everyone had fun exploring and deconstructing the beast that is the Singaporean blogosphere.
Any truth in this? I don't think so. Sure we don't have as many "serious" blogs as the US, but we have them. Given time, the numbers will grow. For now, it is just nice to see more people blogging and reading blogs, and expressing themselves freely. Why create a pigeonhole for our nicely growing communities of blogs?
4. Not really. I do think that many of the popular blogs are socially and politically aware. They just express it in their own ways. You cannot fully appreciate my SNE series without knowing a little about local politics, for instance.
5. I have tried navel gazing, but I cannot see my navel because my tummy gets in the way. I think people who accuse local bloggers of navel gazing are still thinking of blogs as diaries. I read many local blogs that are written by domain experts on topics which have nothing to do with what they took for breakfast or how they feel about love (not to say these are not valid blogging areas either).
I give you a few examples:
www.james.seng.cc (technology)
www.dsng.net (language)
www.singaporesoxfan.com (baseball)
www.preetamrai.com (travel and culture)
6. I think that time may come, this uncovering scandals thing. But already, you see better commentaries online on politics than you read in the papers sometimes. (Although some of it may be a little vulgar.) And I also have better photos of the Lau Pa Sat fire than any local paper, because I was there when it happened.
Given time, I think we will see more citizen journalists come out of the scene here. For now, we are still exploring the medium and enjoying some of the freedom of expression it brings.
Oh, and maybe some of us are waiting to see who gets hammered first, to determine where the OB markers exist (if they CAN exist online in the first place)
7. I suppose like in any medium, sex and humour sell. I see a lot of that in TV and newspapers here too. But there are just as many female and male bloggers I read that do not do the sexy photos thing or write funny. And they do not lack the hits (if that is even a good measure of a blog's value). I think it is easy to create a stereotype if you look for these blogs to highlight in the media.
I mean, you rarely hear of the famous blogger who writes about technology and domain name strategy in the papers. But that fellow is there, and he is well-read by a global audience too. And I can tell you, he is famous.
8. Again, that takes the assumption that all bloggers are online public diarists. Many bloggers with authority write on specialist topics and blogs are merely their medium of distribution. You wouldn't call these bloggers exhibitionist, would you?
9. I very young what. Who said I old? Heheh.
People blog for a myriad of reasons. You can be of any age to blog, because at the end of the day, it is just a platform for self-expression and personal publishing, distributing your content to one to or to many. If there is one thing I have learned from being part of Tomorrow.sg and discovering so many Singapore blogs and blogging communities, is that bloggers come in all ages, shapes and sizes.
Again, the emailing friends question assumes that blogs are online diaries only. But ok, for people who share their lives online with friends via blogs, I can tell you that many of them use Livejournal, which allows them to lock posts to make them private only to their friends. And using this method, a group of friends can have private sharing of each other's lives in a more interactive way than email can ever hope to accomplish. The reason some diarist bloggers are still using public blog systems like blogger.com (where posts cannot made private) is because blogger.com is easier to use, but many may eventually try to find lockable blogging systems to use, once they realise that their personal blogs are actually in a public space.
